The present invention generally relates to information processing apparatuses and methods, and programs and recording media used therewith, and, in particular, to an information processing apparatus and method that ensure fast accessing of a file, and a program and recording medium used therewith.
In recent years, it has frequently been performed that, after an image captured with a camera is converted into digital data, the digital data is subject to processing such as editing. In this case, in many cases, the image data is temporarily recorded in a recording medium. It is common that management of data recording positions in the recording medium is performed in, for example, a file system such as FAT16 (file allocation table 16) or FAT32 (file allocation table 32). In the file system such as FAT16 or FAT32, chain information of data recorded in a form divided into clusters in the recording medium is managed by using a FAT. For example, when a file is read from the recording medium, data formed by a set of clusters is read by referring to the FAT.
As described above, when a file is read from a recording medium, reference to a FAT is frequently performed. Accordingly, for fast reading of a file, fast accessing of the FAT is preferable. Accordingly, the present assignee has proposed a technology (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-141335) for realizing fast file access by reducing a time necessary for referring to a FAT. In this technology, the time is reduced by loading a FAT from an HDD (hard disk drive) into a buffer memory including fast-writable-and-readable SDRAM (synchronous dynamic random access memory) at the time of system initialization, and executing file access by referring to the FAT stored in the buffer memory.
When an HDD having, for example, 30 GB (gigabytes), is formatted, with each cluster size set to 32 KB (kilobytes), the size of a FAT reaches nearly 4 MB (megabytes). Accordingly, there is a limited number of apparatuses in each of which an SDRAM having such a large FAT size is used as a buffer memory, and it may be difficult for some apparatus to store the FAT in the buffer memory.